>>That leads me to believe that the practical number of physical tuners
for a PVR system can
>> be limited by disk IO throughput, and should be an important
consideration when designing,
>> and using the system.
>No. You can probably put a dozen digital tuners in a system before you
might have to
>worry about exceeding the throughput of a single modern hard drive.
Absolutely.. but..
Recording speed with 12 tuners requires 12 concurrent streams to be
written to the disk. The
bottleneck becomes the seek times and rotational latency.
If noise and cost wasn't a problem you would go for 15K RPM drives just
to ensure latency
and seek times are minimized.